Dylan G Gee

Plain English
This large study of over 4,500 US children and adolescents examined whether social and economic disadvantages increase the odds of developing long COVID after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Economic instability combined with food insecurity and poor social support were associated with significantly higher odds of long COVID. Children who faced economic hardship but had food security did not show elevated risk, highlighting food security as a potentially protective factor.

Plain English
This review summarizes ten years of findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, one of the largest long-term studies of child brain development in the US. It highlights how biological, psychological, and social factors interact — rather than act independently — to shape mental health during adolescence. The authors call for research that uses this rich dataset to design better prevention and intervention programs.

Plain English
This study looked at what happened when a specialized early psychosis clinic in Melbourne expanded its intake to include young people with complex mental health presentations beyond the standard at-risk criteria. Forty percent of those admitted under the expanded criteria also met criteria for being at risk for psychosis, and over 90 percent needed more than a year of care. The findings suggest these clinics provide important access to underserved youth but should remain focused on at-risk psychosis cases to maintain quality of care.

Plain English
Researchers used brain imaging to track how patterns of brain network activity shift moment-to-moment in nearly 900 nine- and ten-year-olds, testing whether these dynamic shifts are linked to disruptive behavior problems. Children with more severe disruptive behaviors spent more time in brain states with disrupted connectivity in networks responsible for self-control. These dynamic brain patterns could serve as measurable targets for evaluating whether behavioral treatments are working.

Plain English
This study examined why a specific genetic mutation (ZFTA-RELA fusion) causes brain tumors almost exclusively in children, not adults. Researchers found that certain short-lived stem cells in the developing brain have an open, accessible chromatin landscape that allows this mutation to hijack developmental programs and drive tumor growth. Understanding these developmental windows of vulnerability could lead to more targeted treatments for pediatric brain cancer.

Plain English
This review describes a range of modern statistical methods — including clustering, dimensionality reduction, and machine learning — that researchers can use to better understand the complex and multifaceted nature of childhood adversity. The authors walk through how each method can answer different research questions and highlight studies that have used them effectively. The review serves as a practical guide for moving beyond simple cumulative adversity scores toward richer characterizations of early stress.

Plain English
This study describes the design of CogScreen, a trial to test whether two brief cognitive assessments accurately identify cognitive impairment in 350 young people with first-episode psychosis. The study will compare the screening tools against a gold-standard neuropsychological battery and examine how well they hold up over two weeks. Validated cognitive screening tools could help clinicians quickly identify and treat the thinking and memory problems that strongly predict long-term outcomes in early psychosis.

Plain English
This study used daily diary data from 9- to 18-year-olds to build individual brain-like networks showing how social acceptance, rejection, and mood interact day-to-day for each person. Adolescents with higher social anxiety got a shorter-lasting mood boost from social acceptance, and this pattern was stronger in older adolescents. The findings highlight positive mood as an underappreciated target for understanding why adolescence is a vulnerable period for social anxiety.

Plain English
This study tested whether youth who experienced interpersonal trauma show age-related differences in how their brains learn that a previously dangerous signal is now safe. Trauma-exposed youth successfully learned safety signals but showed altered hippocampal and amygdala activation patterns that varied by age — and weaker hippocampal connections to a frontal region predicted more PTSD symptoms. The results suggest safety learning is intact after trauma but the underlying brain circuitry differs in developmentally specific ways.

Plain English
This study used eye-tracking glasses during a public speaking task to measure where anxious and non-anxious youth look in a social situation. Children with social anxiety showed persistently elevated anxiety throughout the task and spent more time looking at the audience during a passive viewing period. These gaze differences provide new insight into how social anxiety changes attention in real-world situations for young people.

Plain English
Using data from over 11,000 children tracked from ages 9 to 12, this study identified four distinct developmental trajectories for anxiety/depression symptoms and four for behavioral problems, rather than a single pattern. Negative life events were linked to worsening trajectories, while neighborhood safety and parental acceptance were linked to stable or improving ones. The findings map out who is most likely to develop chronic versus improving mental health problems across early adolescence.

Plain English
This paper describes the design of a study to evaluate the accuracy and feasibility of brief cognitive screening tools for young people with first-episode psychosis. No validated screening measures currently exist for this population, and the study will compare two tools against a full neuropsychological assessment in 350 patients across three Australian cities. The goal is to generate evidence that supports routine cognitive assessment as part of standard early psychosis care.

Plain English
This study examined how the timing of childhood adversity relates to the strength of white matter connections throughout the brain in 107 adults. Adversity during preschool and middle childhood (ages 3-8) was most consistently linked to brain changes: sensory and movement pathways showed stronger connections, while pathways for higher-level communication between brain regions showed weaker ones. These specific white matter patterns from early adversity were also linked to post-traumatic stress symptoms in adulthood.

Plain English
This study grouped 120 young adults based on their adversity history across childhood and how their brains respond to threat and safety signals. A group with moderate adversity during middle childhood and adolescence — paired with lower threat responses and stronger safety responses — had the lowest anxiety levels. This suggests that moderate adversity during specific developmental periods may, for some people, support the development of resilience to anxiety.

Plain English
This study tracked how experiences of racial discrimination changed between ages 10 and 14 in a nationally representative sample of US adolescents. Black, Asian American, and multiracial youth showed increasing discrimination over time, while White youth showed decreasing trends. Black youth living in areas with concentrated poverty and in states with higher anti-Black bias reported more discrimination, pointing to structural factors that shape these experiences.

Plain English
Using brain imaging data from nearly 900 nine- and ten-year-olds, this study tested whether the dynamic shifting of brain network states is linked to childhood disruptive behavior problems. Children with more disruptive behaviors spent more time in brain states showing broadly disrupted connectivity across cognitive control networks. Replication in an independent dataset confirmed these dynamic brain patterns as reliable markers of disruptive behavior severity.

Plain English
This study tested whether adults who grew up in unpredictable home environments show differences in how their brains respond during fear extinction — the process of learning that a previously scary thing is now safe. Adults with more unpredictable childhoods showed greater activity in the amygdala early in the extinction process, and this was specifically driven by unpredictable caregiving rather than unpredictable physical environments. Growing up with inconsistent caregivers may leave a lasting mark on how the brain processes safety information.

Plain English
This large study of over 9,000 children examined how different types of psychiatric symptoms relate to how much children move during brain scans. Children with attention and disruptive behavior problems moved more and were more likely to fail scan quality checks, while children with anxiety and depression actually moved less. These findings matter because unaccounted-for motion can bias brain imaging results and create misleading group differences.

Plain English
This study analyzed tiny vesicles that cells release into the bloodstream and found that their genetic cargo differs significantly between people with and without obesity. The genes expressed in these vesicles matched those regulated by obesity-related genetic variants in fat tissue, and were enriched for genes linked to type 2 diabetes and inflammation. This convergence of blood-based liquid biopsy data with genetic and epigenomic data opens new avenues for studying complex metabolic diseases.

Plain English
Researchers trained a machine learning model on brain connectivity data to predict how much trauma a person had experienced, then tested whether that trauma-linked brain network responded differently to an acute stressor. After mild stress exposure, the brain network associated with greater past trauma showed reduced connectivity — and lower connectivity in this network after stress was linked to fewer depressive symptoms. This suggests acute stress may temporarily quiet trauma-related brain circuitry in a way that supports emotional recovery.

Plain English
This study used statistical grouping methods to identify five distinct profiles of people based on how they perceive control over their lives and how severe their trauma-related symptoms are. Experiencing more early-life stress and feeling that stressors were uncontrollable predicted membership in higher-symptom groups. The results suggest that perceived lack of control during early stressors plays an important role in who develops lasting trauma symptoms.

Plain English
Researchers discovered that the cancer-driving ZFTA-RELA fusion protein forms liquid-like droplets in the cell nucleus, and that a disordered protein region is essential for this droplet formation and for activating cancer genes. Mutating this region or replacing it with similar disordered regions from other proteins either abolished or restored tumor formation in mice. This pinpoints protein condensate formation as a critical step in how fusion oncoproteins cause brain cancer.

Plain English
This study used data from nearly 2,500 children at ages 9-10 to predict which ones would develop depression symptoms by ages 12-13. Among youth with a family history of depression, weaker connectivity in the cingulo-parietal brain network combined with higher family conflict predicted more symptoms later, while stronger connectivity was protective. These findings suggest that brain connectivity measures could help identify at-risk children before symptoms emerge.

Plain English
This study tracked how variability in second-by-second brain state switching changes from childhood through young adulthood in over 3,000 participants. Brain state variability followed a consistent developmental trajectory that stabilized around mid-adolescence, with timing differing by sex. Youth whose brain variability deviated from the typical trajectory showed worse executive function, suggesting this measure reflects healthy brain flexibility.

Plain English
This study in 607 children and adolescents found that the structural-functional coupling between the amygdala and a key emotion-regulation brain region (vmPFC) increases with age specifically in youth who experienced higher adversity. Stronger amygdala-vmPFC coupling was associated with fewer anxiety and depression symptoms among high-adversity youth, suggesting it acts as a buffer. The hippocampus showed a different pattern, with higher adversity linked to weaker connections — pointing to distinct ways the brain adapts to stress.

Plain English
This study in 64 healthy adults tested whether anxiety level influences how the brain learns to use a safety signal to suppress fear. People with higher trait anxiety showed less fear reduction during safety learning and also showed weaker activity in the hippocampus and its connections to the frontal cortex. These findings suggest that individual differences in anxiety affect both the behavioral and brain mechanisms of safety learning, which could inform how fear-reduction therapies are tailored to patients.

Plain English
This study compared outcomes for patients who had weight loss surgery and went home the same day versus those who stayed overnight at a large academic hospital. Same-day discharge patients had similar complication and readmission rates as overnight patients, and their total care costs were about 7 percent lower. The results support offering same-day discharge as a safe and cost-effective option for carefully selected patients undergoing this procedure.

Plain English
This study tested whether a satellite radar technique called APSIS-InSAR can detect the seasonal swelling and shrinking of tropical peat soils under dense forest in Malaysia. The radar signal penetrated the forest canopy well enough to measure surface movement at 20-meter resolution across the landscape. The approach could enable continuous, large-scale monitoring of peatland degradation — a major source of carbon emissions — that is currently very difficult to measure on the ground.

Plain English
This study used a specialized blood clotting test in 202 vascular surgery patients to see whether patients with obesity or diabetes show clotting profiles similar to those who develop blood clots after surgery. Patients with obesity or diabetes had higher platelet activity, and those who clotted had similar profiles — with standard anticoagulants failing to normalize these results. This suggests the test could help identify high-clotting-risk patients before surgery so that antiplatelet drugs can be used to prevent complications.

Plain English
This commentary from 23 clinical psychology trainees responds to a proposal for reforming clinical training by calling for more collaborative decision-making between trainees and program leadership. The authors argue that genuine reform requires including trainee voices in shaping the policies that govern their education. They express cautious optimism but emphasize that overcoming systemic barriers will take a coordinated, multi-stakeholder effort.

Plain English
This large study of over 365,000 bariatric surgery patients asked whether routinely taking an X-ray swallow test the day after surgery helps catch leaks sooner. Patients who had routine swallow studies had similar times to leak diagnosis and similar leak rates compared to those who did not. The findings suggest that routine post-operative swallow studies do not provide a diagnostic benefit and hospitals should consider stopping the practice.

Plain English
This small study examined whether weight loss surgery could help morbidly obese patients with end-stage heart failure lose enough weight to qualify for a heart transplant. Among patients who had surgery, 37.5 percent eventually received a transplant compared to 20 percent who did not, and there were fewer deaths in the surgery group. The results suggest that sleeve gastrectomy may be a viable bridge strategy for obese patients waiting for heart transplantation.

Plain English
This paper describes the design of RECOVER-Pediatrics, a large national study tracking long COVID in children and young adults from birth through age 25 across more than 100 US sites. The study uses multiple data collection tiers ranging from remote surveys to deep biological phenotyping of the most severely affected children. The goal is to define what pediatric long COVID looks like, who gets it, and what biological mechanisms drive it — information needed to identify treatment targets.

Plain English
This study analyzed twenty years of national health survey data to track hypertension trends among Mexican American adults compared to non-Hispanic White adults. Hypertension prevalence rose significantly among Mexican Americans and was higher overall than in White adults, with higher acculturation linked to greater risk. The findings suggest that preserving traditional lifestyle habits may help reduce hypertension risk in this population.

Plain English
This paper argues that community-engaged research methods — which directly involve youth, families, and communities in study design and implementation — are underused in clinical psychological science despite their potential to improve real-world relevance. The authors describe a spectrum of engagement levels and show how these methods can complement experimental designs, including randomized trials. The paper calls for structural changes in training and funding to make these methods more accessible to clinical researchers.

Plain English
This study tested whether the race of faces shown in cognitive tasks influences performance differently in Black and White 9- and 10-year-olds using a national sample of over 5,600 children. Both groups showed better attention performance when viewing Black faces, but only White children showed better recognition memory for same-race faces. These results show that race-related effects on cognitive performance are present in children and could create misleading results in studies that don't account for face race.

Plain English
This study identified which brain connectivity patterns in 9- and 10-year-olds predict the onset of depression symptoms by ages 11-12, focusing specifically on children with a family history of depression. Youth at high familial risk showed stronger links between preadolescent amygdala and striatal brain connectivity and later depression, compared to low-risk youth. These brain markers could potentially identify high-risk children early enough to intervene before depression takes hold.

Plain English
This paper examines how housing insecurity — including unaffordable, unsafe, and unstable housing — harms children's mental health and what brain pathways might link these experiences to psychiatric risk. The authors propose that the unpredictability of housing stress disrupts brain circuits involved in emotional and cognitive development. They also advocate for combining community-engaged research methods with neuroscience to ensure findings translate into equitable and effective policies.

Plain English
This study tracked how individual clusters of cancer cells within the same triple-negative breast cancer tumor responded differently to platinum chemotherapy over 2.5 years. Cells with strong genetic fitness under the drug underwent clonal takeover and showed minimal reversal of drug-induced gene changes, while weaker cells showed more flexible — and reversible — gene expression changes. This demonstrates that both genetic and non-genetic mechanisms contribute to drug resistance within a single tumor, which has direct implications for retreatment strategies.

Plain English
This large multicenter study identified the most common lasting symptoms in children ages 6-17 following COVID-19 infection and found that school-age children and adolescents had overlapping but distinct symptom profiles for long COVID. Researchers created separate research indices — combinations of symptoms most reliably tied to infection history — that were also associated with worse quality of life. The indices and four distinct symptom cluster types identified here provide a foundation for studying long COVID mechanisms and treatments in pediatric patients.

Plain English
This study tracked how much the brain shifts between different activity states from moment to moment, measuring this variability in over 3,000 children and young adults across cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets. Brain state variability changed consistently with age and stabilized around mid-adolescence, with the timing depending on sex and which brain state was examined. Children whose brain variability followed atypical patterns had worse performance on tasks requiring mental flexibility and planning.

Plain English
This analysis of a large US adolescent cohort tracked racial discrimination experiences from ages 10 to 14 and found that perceived discrimination increased significantly for Black and Asian adolescents, with nearly half of Black adolescents reporting discrimination by age 14. Geographic context mattered: Black adolescents in the Western US and predominantly White wealthy neighborhoods reported more discrimination. The findings call for interventions that account for the structural and geographic drivers of discrimination during this critical developmental window.

Plain English
This study looked at the outcomes of metabolic and bariatric surgery (MBS) in adolescents with severe obesity over seven years. Out of 79 patients, those who had a sleeve gastrectomy lost an average of 23% of their total body weight after about three years, while those who had a gastric bypass lost 28% after about 2.5 years. Notably, 57% of patients saw improvements in their weight-related health issues after surgery, and there were very few complications, showing that this procedure is a safe and effective option for young people struggling with obesity. Who this helps: This benefits adolescents with severe obesity and their healthcare providers.

Plain English
This study examined how well prepared surgical fellows are for robotic surgery when they begin their specialized training. Out of 78 fellows surveyed, 46% had no robotic training during their residency, yet 87% believed a standardized robotic training program would have been helpful. The findings indicate that many fellows feel their skills in robotic surgery are not sufficient at the start of their fellowship, and over 70% think a formal evaluation of their skills could enhance their training. Who this helps: This helps surgical fellows and residency programs by improving training standards for robotic surgery.

Plain English
This large study of 9,000 children examined how different types of behavioral and emotional symptoms relate to how much children move during various types of brain scans. Attention and disruptive behavior problems were linked to more movement and higher scan failure rates, while anxiety and depression were linked to less movement. Knowing these patterns helps researchers design studies and correct for motion artifacts in ways that are specific to each symptom type.

Plain English
This study used brain imaging data from over 4,200 children to examine whether parental mental health problems are linked to the connectivity of their children's emotion regulation brain networks. Parents with higher internalizing or externalizing symptoms had children with altered connectivity in multiple emotion regulation circuits. Despite these brain differences, parental-to-youth transmission of psychopathology was not explained by the children's brain connectivity patterns.

Plain English
This study found that small vesicles circulating in blood carry genetic material from fat tissue that differs between obese and lean individuals, and these differences match genes linked to obesity by large-scale genetic studies. Genes in the vesicles were also enriched for connections to type 2 diabetes and inflammation. The study demonstrates that circulating vesicles can serve as a window into tissue-specific biology relevant to metabolic disease.

Plain English
This large surgical database study re-examined the "obesity paradox" — the surprising finding that heavier patients sometimes have better surgical outcomes. While the paradox held broadly, it disappeared in patients undergoing highly complex surgeries or in those with many serious medical conditions. These findings suggest that obesity may only be protective under certain clinical conditions, and high-risk patients should not be expected to benefit from this effect.